You Dirty Beasts

Simon Lee reviews “Beasts of England” by Adam Biles, an update to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

By Simon LeeAugust 28, 2024

• Fiction

BEASTS OF ENGLAND—Adam Biles’s 2023 sequel to George Orwell’s 1945 classic Animal Farm—opens with a dig at contemporary culture.

When the leader of the Animalists unveils a new mural documenting the farm’s history, the animals respond with wonder and confusion. A sheep identifies one of the pigs in the mural as Old Major, the beloved ideologue, but a magpie insists it’s actually Napoleon, the later tyrant. This leads the sheep to ask, “Who?” A collective amnesia of recent history, paired with a general obliviousness about the factors that shaped their existence, sets the stage for what will become the animals’ inevitable exploitation. By extension, this scene calls attention to Orwell’s relevance in cultural discourse. What’s implied is that, while it’s probable that many would have a general awareness of the author after likely encountering Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) at some point in their lives, readers are left similarly vulnerable if their grasp of these works is hazy. Given the text’s emphasis on exploited ignorance, this opening gambit condemns both the cultural moment and the political climate, serving as an apt justification of sequels like Beasts of England that remind us of Orwell’s warnings.

Animal Farm has been a staple of high school English courses for decades, an ostensibly odd one given conservative attacks on education, educators, and literacy in general. Despite the allegory’s evident references to the Russian Revolution—with characters like Farmer Jones standing in for Tsar Nicholas II, Napoleon for Joseph Stalin, and Snowball for Leon Trotsky—it reflects broader themes of autocratic control and political corruption. The book almost didn’t even see print. Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, backed away from the manuscript, worried about offending the Soviet Union, which was still allied with Orwell’s Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany; T. S. Eliot, working for Faber & Faber at the time, also rejected the project, citing his preference for the authoritarian pigs. The novella gained popularity in the United States after being adopted by the Book of the Month Club in 1946, and Animal Farm’s canonization was cemented in the anticommunist 1950s.

The original is widely regarded as a master class in rhetorical persuasion, a quintessential example of political satire, and a skillfully executed model of the beast fable ascribed to Aesop. However, for those who were introduced to it in their youth, it is likely remembered in fragments with the nuance left hazy. This becomes an issue when the narrative, and Orwell more broadly, is claimed and misappropriated as a political cudgel by cunning opportunists without requisite protest. In recent years, a number of politicians have deployed the term Orwellian against their adversaries, aware that such attacks will likely land without adequate critical scrutiny. In the United States, for instance, figures like Madison Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert, and Josh Hawley have all tried to twist Orwell’s ideas to match their own cause. Given this, Orwell’s ideas hold much relevance today, in part because they are vulnerable to being co-opted and systematically neutralized in a manner that recalls the original narratives’ warnings about rhetorical chicanery.

Beasts of England opens by connecting Orwell’s farm to its current incarnation as “The South of England’s Premium Petting Zoo.” Buttercup, the porcine leader of the Animalists, has just won a sixth-term reelection in the annual “Choozin.” In terms of tenure as “First Beast,” he is second only to the seven-and-a-half-year reign of the Jonesists’ “formidable sow,” Traviata. This exposition establishes dueling political factions: the Animalist party seeks to balance social responsibility with the farm’s economic viability whereas the Jonesist party is driven by privatization, self-interested directives, and secretive collusions with humans.

Napoleon, the leader of the first animal revolution, is now remembered as “a devious porker who abused the greenness of his liberated comrades while betraying the beliefs that had fuelled the original rebellion.” After Napoleon was “shipped off to the great knacker in the sky,” the farm replaced some of his authoritarianism with democratic policies by joining the Wealden Union of Farmers (WUF)—what will later become a stand-in for the European Union in the novel’s commentary on nationalism, economic sovereignty, pandemics, and Brexit.

From the start, Biles adopts Orwell’s humor and increases it. For instance, he notches up Animal Farm’s reliance on anthropomorphism with animals who perform in ways that invite the reader to identify real-world counterparts. One example is Rocky, a ginger tom who acts as a kind of emcee. At one point, he hosts an apple-bobbing competition in which the winner is awarded a break from their labor and “respite from the drudgery of their lives.” He appears dressed in a “tiny, sequined tuxedo” that “glisten[s] under the lights” of his stage. After licking his paws and shaping his fur into “a jaunty crest,” he greets his audience with a crass “Good evening, you dirty beasts!” in a tone befitting of a game show host.

Another is Duke, a goose who has “retired from the gaggle” and now spends his days eating “strange vision-causing mushrooms,” serving as a stand-in for a figure like Hunter S. Thompson. He is introduced as wearing “aviator sunglasses, held to his head by a rubber band,” and “in his beak, a cigarette in a long holder loose[s] thick curls of smoke into the air.” Beasts of England is filled with such caricatures who push the talking animal motif toward something more ludic by inviting the reader to pinpoint a likely source. A tactic of the novel, it seems, is to riff on contemporary personalities and events but without the particular references of Orwell’s original.

These playful allusions result in a darker humor than the original, and the novel tests readers’ limits by satirizing recent issues and events that are no laughing matter. For instance, squirrels are brought in to perform menial labor that others refuse to do—an obvious nod to immigrant exploitation. When the farm can no longer afford to pay the squirrels, the animals are required to pick up the slack. Their readiness to bob for Rocky’s apples and win vacations underscores how easily creature comforts distract them from capitalism’s more exploitative operations. The first third of the novel matches charm with gallows humor, but the tone shifts considerably as conditions on the farm worsen. Characters who are initially introduced as adorable meet grisly ends, and it is clear that Biles has a particular trajectory in mind. Much of the violence recounts real events from the last decade, and the final sequence lands somewhere between the Book of Revelation, Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, and a Hieronymous Bosch panorama. The evolution from the opening humor to the shocking conclusion is perhaps excessive but also apt in light of the concerns raised.

Orwell’s commitment to satire was unambiguous; he hoped to “push the world in a certain direction” by “alter[ing] other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” Whereas satire is generally understood as a mode meant to enact social change, Orwell’s writing also served as a portent of the future. Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, despite their relative wittiness, are cautionary narratives. In a 1946 essay published in Polemic, Orwell laid bare the concerns he saw as central to a novella like Animal Farm:

The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towards liberty and human brotherhood, which are easily played upon by power-hungry individuals or minorities. So that history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.

Satire has historically sided with progress and social justice. Right-wing stabs at satire veer more toward online trolling and performative attention-seeking, aspects of which have certainly been adopted by conservative politicians, especially in the United States. As Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx note, “conservatism and satiric irony do not mix.” As such, right-wing appropriations of Orwellian satire are more likely to be misappropriations intended to undermine Orwell’s ideas through doublespeak rather than intentional stabs at satire. As Biles’s novel indicates, the efficacy of intentional misappropriations is proportional to a culture’s inability to parse nuance and context. Therefore, Biles’s sequel speaks to the need to monitor and counter bad-faith efforts, made clear in the opening sequence when the animals can only recall the most superficial details of the original story.

Orwell was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1947, underwent a series of treatments over the next two years, and succumbed in January 1950. Animal Farm came out in 1945, and he wrote much of Nineteen Eighty-Four while sick. Thus, the author would have had little insight into either text’s legacy or the rise of Orwellian as a loaded term. He entertained the idea of a stage adaptation of Nineteen Eight-Four, but in a 1949 letter to his agent, Leonard Moore, he also expressed concern about the adaptation’s ability to sustain the text’s underlying ethics: “What I was afraid of was that the meaning of the book might be seriously deformed, more than is unavoidable in any stage adaptation of a novel.” Given this, it might be assumed that the potential of the text’s afterlife—and the need to safeguard meaning––was considered from the start. This is significant in terms of parsing distinctions between right-wing misappropriations of Orwell’s legacy and a text like Beasts of England that upholds the original sentiment.

Evident in Biles’s sequel, though, is the need to expand the original’s allegories. Orwell’s text was dedicated in its focus, but Biles has said that Beasts of England’s more complex plotting and characters were designed to reproduce the state of the world today. In this sense, it’s possible to question how Orwell might have felt about such a move and whether a turn to more open-ended allegories might constitute something like a “deformation.” What has changed between the historical past of Animal Farm and the historical present in Biles’s sequel, though, is a turn toward a politics of chaos. Social media plays a conspicuous role, allegorized by a flock of chirping starlings clearly meant as a reference to Twitter. A number of the starlings are, in fact mechanical, pointing toward the active presence of bots designed to wreak both social and political havoc. But a subset of starlings eventually goes rogue to help counter the infiltrating messages. Starlings land on shoulders and whisper theories into impressionable animals’ minds. The animals then mount fruit crates and rant their theories at each other, several of which gain traction, especially from those most able to project their voices through loudspeakers in a manner that calls to mind the rise and outsize influence of conspiratorial podcasting.

In addition to developing characters as pliable allegories, Beasts of England also uses scenarios and set pieces that call to mind events associated with recent political chaos. However, the lack of specificity—combined with proliferating social unrest in today’s world—renders several of these scenes as allegorical types as well.

For instance, Haw-Haw—clearly a reference to figures like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—secretly records Buttercup discussing his concerns for the farm. He then splices and reedits the recording in ways that fundamentally alter its original meaning, the goal being to sow discord, heighten paranoia, and cause the animals to drive Buttercup off the farm. Cherry-picked data, edited source material, and strategic decontextualization are, of course, common tactics deployed by such figures. But this scene can also be read as a callback to concerns about the attempted deformation of Orwell’s legacy by right-wing operatives. The clownish Jumbo—a sleazy combination of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson—seizes on similar occasions, implying at one of his rallies that the electricity cables from the windmill are powering neighboring farms. What follows echoes Trump’s provocations that led to the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. When the animals—driven on by Jumbo’s inflammatory rhetoric—storm the windmill and chew through the cables, several are killed in the process. Though indirect in terms of the particulars, the overall gist is clear.

That said, Biles’s characterization of Jumbo as a figurehead helps show where the readers’ concerns should lie. The real threat, Curly, lurks in the shadows throughout much of the story, fiddling with his slide rule, and grinning as life on Manor Farm worsens. Clearly, Curly represents calculating figures like Dominic Cummings and Steve Bannon, manipulating chaotic, sensational actors like Jumbo for their own purposes. Notably, Bannon cited Cummings as a model for chaotic disruption or the “dark arts” of politics. Bannon would later claim that the best way to sow chaos in society is to “flood the zone with shit,” a move that certainly mirrors the animals’ dire state in the novel. But Biles adds a twist, demonstrating how even characters like Curly can lose control of their own machinations once power gains momentum. When Benjamin, the lone surviving character from the original Animal Farm, escapes his imprisonment in the windmill, he discovers “A picked-clean pig skeleton […] strung up by its neck” next to a sign that declares Curly to be a “bastard baston backstabber” and “enemy of the manor,” proving that even the most scheming opportunists can succumb to their own designs once power runs amok.

Chants are also central to the political machinations, and Jumbo often enrages his followers by using three-word, monosyllabic directives. Perhaps the most prominent in the novel, and the one repeated while the animals attack the windmill, is “dig the moat!” Once more, Biles’s source material is unambiguous, but the allegory is broadened. While the chant is clearly a reference to Trump’s “build the wall” refrain, “dig the moat” also touches on Brexit’s romanticization of economic sovereignty and separation from the EU. Trump, of course, was known to elaborate on chants in the same manner as the Jonesists, once claiming he would install a snake and alligator–infested moat at the southern border to appeal to both racist and masochistic fantasies in a single image. But just as Brexit’s promise of economic sovereignty was quickly proven to be a lie, and Trump’s chants were an obvious ruse to all but his most adherent supporters, Jumbo’s promise to dig the moat exemplifies how Biles uses broad allegories to speculate about dystopian inevitabilities: following Jumbo’s election, his supporters find themselves ultimately tasked with the digging. While Beasts of England’s characterizations start out as darkly humorous, the scenarios that follow feel far less amusing as the references hit home in forceful ways. This is to say that Biles’s novel goes from being a bit on the nose to something akin to a full-on pummeling. However, the key is that the events portrayed are rendered oblique in ways that allow the reader to link the narrative situations with any number of situations occurring in present-day politics at the hands of bad actors and manipulators.

As it happens, Biles’s sequel speaks to a trend in recent publishing: a drive to revisit and sustain Orwell’s concerns. For instance, in the 2023 reboot of Nineteen Eighty-Four titled Julia, Sandra Newman retells the dystopian classic from the perspective of Winston Smith’s love interest, suggesting a need to reconsider the novel’s gender politics from a contemporary angle. Last year also saw the release of two new biographies—D. J. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life and Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life—offering critical insights into the author’s past while reframing his enduring legacy. Biles’s novel builds on Orwell’s work in similar ways by bringing the author’s past concerns into the present. Although this influx of new writing is likely coincidental, it does speak to Orwell’s significance as a literary figure, the vexed nature of the term Orwellian, and the need to engage with his topics and ideas in our own turbulent times. Beasts of England effectively picks up where the original left off and follows the same structural logic of sounding alarms about authoritarian control.

One of the most striking aspects of the Right’s efforts to misappropriate and nullify Orwell is their awareness that such a tactic is wholly viable in today’s culture. In the text, Benjamin is imprisoned because of his capacity to see through political chicanery, the history of the farm is intentionally buried under a scrap pile, and characters like Martha and Cassie—who potentially threaten to expose power—are dealt with accordingly. Not only do political opportunists thrive on ignorance, but it is also clearer now than ever before that ignorance itself can be engineered and systematized by limiting access to knowledge and demonizing educational institutions. Today, such schemes are carried out in broad daylight with minimal scrutiny. From Christopher Rufo’s openness about his intent to vilify critical race Theory to Republican vice presidential pick J. D. Vance’s 2021 charge to “aggressively attack universities,” strategically recycling Richard Nixon’s paranoid 1972 claim that “the professors are the enemy,” such efforts are more insidious and dangerous than ever in a distracted culture. When Duke tries to explain to Martha how Curly and his human accomplices are leading the animals to cannibalism, Martha states, “I don’t understand.” Duke’s response is that “nobody does,” adding, “That’s what they rely on. That’s how they get away with it.”

Adapting Orwell takes guts, but Biles’s suitability for the task seems apt, given his entrenchment in the literary world. He serves as literary director at the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, where he oversees their weekly podcasts, conducting interviews with myriad authors. His first novel, 2016’s Feeding Time, centers on a rebellion in a retirement community, the tone of which sets the stage for Beasts of England’s mix of dark humor and unsettling imagery. Speaking with Orwell biographer Dorian Lynskey, Biles explained his revisionist impulse as an effort to better understand literature’s capacity to intervene in society. Referring to Orwell’s own claim that Animal Farm served as his first real stab at bridging politics and art, Biles remarks that he “just thought that was a really interesting turn of phrase, particularly not like a political point or a political message, but a political purpose.” This meant that “not only did Orwell want to convey ideas with this book, but he also wanted this book to have an effect.” The result, for Biles, is that it made him think more about how “books in some sort of limited way can still have a political effect.”

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Featured image: Alexandre Gabriel Decamps. Study of Pigs, 1850-1860. Henry Field Memorial Collection, Art Institute of Chicago (1894.1047). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed August 27, 2024. Image has been cropped.